But how did we arrive at this robot-dominated world of tomorrow? It all started with a simple robotic arm.

For its origin story, we look back to the nuclear industry (like Godzilla got his start). We also explore whether robots create or destroy jobs (spoiler alert: it’s both, depending on which study you read) and the imagine the future of humans and robots working side by side.

VICE News spoke with Howie Choset, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, and Byron Clayton, the CEO of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute, about the history of the robotic arm.